Jihad in America: the women warriors fighting soft, feminized jihad

Jihad in America has a feminine face: Muslim women are telling us Islam isn’t violent and, if it is, that’s our fault — so suck it up.

Unlike Europeans, who have a consistent habit of responding both passively and apologetically to Muslim terrorist attacks, Americans don’t like being blown up, shot up, or beheaded. It tends to make them fractious and then they start demanding that their leaders bomb the bombers or keep them off American soil. In other words, direct jihad warfare against Americans is not an especially effective tactic and it can invite unpleasant reprisals.

So, what’s a jihadist to do? In America, I think, the answer is what I call a soft or feminized jihad. Feminized jihad consists of finding personable Muslim women who, under the guise of outreach and Leftist intersectionality, attack Americans and American policy, defend Islam, and slowly, stealthily, advance radical Islam’s cause in America.

This post has been germinating in my mind for some time, but the real impetus for my publishing today was the fact that a friend sent me an announcement about a minimum continuing legal education seminar that the Bar Association of San Francisco (“BASF”) was sponsoring. (You can see my thoughts about those despicable MCLE classes here.) Here’s the announcement for the seminar, which is taking place today:

Topics
• The history of court challenges to executive orders and presidential power
• Recent court challenges to President Trump’s travel ban
• The strengths and limits of court challenges to the power of the executive branch
• The next chapter-litigating future executive orders

Reading the announcement, the first thing that caught my eye was that one of the speakers at a seminar dedicated to hobbling President Trump’s constitutional right to issue executive orders is from CAIR, aka the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR, of course, believes that, when it comes to American-Islamic relations, the American side, not the Islamic said, needs to change and accommodate.

The second thing I noticed was that the CAIR representative is a woman, Zahra Billoo. Her presence on the panel reinforced my sense that there are certainly a lot of women speaking up on behalf of the Muslim community in America.

In a way, the overt presence of Muslim women is a continuation of the amazing success the Palestinians had when they promoted Hanan Ashrawi to be their spokesman to the Western world. The West was utterly blind to the fact that Muslims, whose faith is predicated on subordinating women, waived before them an apparently emancipated woman.

To the reporters, Ashrawi was charm and honesty personified. To those of us who have always known the Palestinians for what they are – genocidal, terrorist theocrats – she was the smiling apologist who offered unending lies about Israel’s alleged brutality and about the PLO’s true, violent, repressive nature. In retrospect, given Ashrawi’s phenomenal success in advancing the Palestinian cause, it’s surprising that it took the Islamists so long to realize that the best way to wage jihad against Americans isn’t through bloodshed and threat, it’s through smiling, soft-spoken women. I’d like to tell you about three of those women:

Moina Shaiq

Although the BASF announcement triggered my post, I had started thinking about a soft, feminized jihad post last week when my local paper ran an admiring column about Moina Shaiq, who runs “meet a Muslim” outreach programs. Reading about Shaiq, I realized that she has no desire to moderate Islam so as to ensure that this supposed “religion of peace,” has fewer violent adherents. Instead, her job is to anesthetize Americans to the problems in Islam.

Shaiq is a Pakistani woman who has lived in America for 40 years. After 9/11, hid in her house, not because she was embarrassed by her co-religionists, but because she was scared of Americans:

Moina Shaiq didn’t venture outside on Sept. 11, 2001 — or the next day, or the day after that.

It took her more than a week to finally leave her opulent Fremont home — as always with a headscarf covering her hair — and go grocery shopping for her family.

At the time, Shaiq could barely face a world she thought hated her.

Shaiq waited a while to step forward. Indeed, it was not until the San Bernardino massacre that she felt it incumbent to tell Americans that it’s an illusion that a significant number of Muslims are filled with violent hatred against the West. It’s worth noting that, even before San Bernardino, there were lots of opportunities to come forward to explain Islam after a Muslim attack against Americans. Here are just a few highlights, all of which have larger death tolls than the innumerable Islam-inspired murders involving fewer than three people. Shaiq could have come forward:

After 9/11, when Muslims killed 2,996 people.

In 2002, when Muslim snipers killed 12 people over a two month period. One of those snipers, by the way, got a pass on his life sentence because a judge concluded that, even though he was 17 when he committed the multiple murders, a life sentence was unconstitutional. Those he killed were not on hand to talk about the end-of-life sentences Lee Boyd Malvo, who was only a year away from being a legal adult, handed them.

In 2009, after a Muslim psychiatrist murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas.

In 2011, when a Muslim terrorist murdered three Jewish men by slitting their throats.

In 2013, when a Muslim targeted and murdered two Coptic Christians.

In 2013, when two very religious Muslims set of a bomb at the Boston Marathon, killing 3 and injuring 264.

In 2015, when a devout Muslim attacked a military recruiting center, killing 5.

Shaiq finally stepped forward in 2015, when a religious Muslim couple murdered 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. Since then:

In 2016, a Muslim man murdered 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida.

In 2017, an Islamic convert murdered five people at the baggage claim area in Fort Lauderdale.

It’s unclear whether Islamic mass murder attacks in Europe affected Shaiq’s decision to stop forward. There certainly have been enough of them. Again, here are just a few highlights about Islamic attacks abroad since 9/11:

Moscow, 2002: Muslims kill 129 people at a theater.

Moscow, 2003: Muslim suicide bombers kill 14 young people at a rock concert.

The above list doesn’t include the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed 166; the 2013 al-Shabaab mall massacre in Kenya that killed 67; or the almost uncountable regular jihadist attacks taking place in Russia, Turkey, and other parts of the world, especially the Muslim world.

When Shaiq’s comes forward, she’s not speaking to the terrorists. Instead, her stated goal, according to a sympathetic article in the Marin Independent Journal, is to counter “the spike in hate crimes and widespread ‘Islamophobia’ that has gripped the country, ignited during the recent election by Trump’s threat of a Muslim registry and Muslim immigration ban.” Before I get to the substance of Shaiq’s “outreach,” let’s look the assumptions in that quoted sentence from a complicit media outlet.

Was there really a spike in hate crimes? Well, maybe, although it’s hard to tell because the FBI hasn’t released its hate crime statistics for 2016. One can, however, look at available data and get some ideas about just how prevalent — or not-prevalent — anti-Islamic hate crimes really are.

In 2015, the last year for which there were statistics, there were only 1,402 victims of any anti-religious hate crimes in the entire U.S. 52.1% of these 1,402 crimes involved antisemitism. 21.9% of these 1,402 crimes involved anti-Islamic sentiment. Interestingly, while the report breaks victims down by religion, it does not break offenders down by religion. Go figure.

Media outlets have alleged that, after the election, there was a surge in hate crimes against Muslims, with the number rising from 154 incidents in 2014 to 257 in 2015 (a year that predates Trump’s alleged racist wrongdoings). One doesn’t need to be a math genius to figure at that 257 hate crimes is an infinitesimal number compared to the total 300,000,000 people who live in America.

What the MSM is less anxious to focus on is the fact that, since Trump appeared on the scene, many of those reported anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2016 were, in fact, hoaxes (and no, you’re not imagining that a lot of these hoaxes originate with women):

Hoax hate crimes aren’t limited to the United States. For example, in Austria, a teenage Muslim girl falsely alleged that she was called a terrorist and pushed onto train tracks.

Given the number of fake hate crimes, one has to wonder if there’s been an actual spike in hate crimes against Muslims or just a spike in hoax crimes allegedly against Muslims.

And was there really a Muslim ban? Those who don’t consume only the MSM’s output know that there was not. President Trump issued an executive order temporarily halting immigration from a handful of countries that the Obama administration had identified as terrorist exporters. Perhaps coincidentally, countries that export terrorism are Muslim. The reality is that those terror exporting states are only a small subset of the total number of Muslim majority states worldwide that the ban did not affect.

Put another way, Shaiq’s outreach is aimed at non-existent threats. However, I’ll give Shaiq a pass on her alleged perception that Muslims are under threat in America. After all, given media hysteria since President Trump came on the scene, uninformed people can be forgiven for thinking that Muslims in America are living on the knife’s edge, harassed by both the public and the government.

Now, if I were in Shaiq’s shoes, it would seem to me that the logical thing is to counter violent impulses within the Muslim community. That’s not what Shaiq does, though. Instead, according to the Marin IJ article, she lies about Islam and complains about America.

Her lies are her claim that there’s nothing in Islam that calls for war against the West. Certainly apologists for Islam claim that jihad doesn’t exist, but the fact is (a) that the Koran is explicit in its calls for Holy War to conquer the world and (b) the word “innocents” (as in, Muslims won’t kill innocents) is a wiggle word applying only to Muslims, not to non-Muslims (and then only to Muslims of the sect doing the killing). Rather than rehashing the reality behind Western Islamists’ protestations that Islam is a religion of peace, I suggest these Raymond Ibrahim posts:

Shaiq’s blame game is to contend that, if Islam’s commit violence, it’s because America made them do it. Specifically, she cites drone warfare in Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan. I’d just like to point out as an aside that the drone warfare was Obama’s pet project.

According to another article lauding Shaiq, her approach to promoting tolerance isn’t to tell Muslims to be tolerant of other faiths and to stop killing them. Instead, it’s to tell non-Muslims to stop complaining about Muslim assaults:

“Then, in December of last year, another terror attack, this time in San Bernardino, California, shook me to my core. I realized that, in the work I had been doing to promote tolerance, I was always preaching ‘to the choir.’ After San Bernardino, I wanted to reach ‘the masses,’ or at least people who might have never met and spoken to a Muslim before.”

“Today, when anything happens, the first thing that comes to our minds is, ‘Oh God, I hope it’s not a Muslim,’’ she said.

Shaiq wants everyone to know that no Muslim should feel responsible when other Muslims attack — obviating her or her peaceful co-religionists from taking the brave stands that Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Dr. Zuhdi Jasser do in combating violent Islam:

One reason Shaiq says she works so hard to show Muslims in a positive light is that she often feels misplaced guilt when a Muslim commits an act of violence.

Zahra Billoo

Zahra Billoo, who’s speaking today at the BASF seminar on attacking President Trump, is cut from the same cloth as Shaiq: She’s personable, a Leftist, and believes that the way to change perceptions about Islam isn’t to speak out against violent co-religionists but is, instead, scold Americans for being Islamophobic.

In Billoo’s world, even a media that is pro-Democrat, pro-Palestinian, and pro-the “Religion of Peace” narrative, is the enemy:

Zahra said the mass media disproportionately covers Muslim terrorists, rather than other terrorists, and tends to consider Muslims guilty until proven innocent when they are accused of terrorism. She said a double standard exists in that Muslims are asked to apologize for violent acts committed by Muslims, whereas other groups are not asked to apologize for violence committed by their members.

Maybe we don’t want apologies. Maybe we just want Muslims to admit that there’s a problem with Islam and, maybe, just maybe, to address that problem.

Billoo also complains about the allegedly false statistics regarding Muslim violence. (And, as always with these people, picks up the numbers after 9/11.)

According to an article in the New York Times on June 24, 2015, 48 people have been killed in the United States by non-Muslim extremists since 9/11, whereas 26 have been killed by Muslim extremists. The story suggests that the media has under-reported attacks by right-wing hate groups, at least when compared to attacks by Jihadists, and that political pressure from conservatives has caused government entities to de-emphasize the danger of lethal crimes inspired by right-wing ideology.

As I’ve demonstrated in regard to Shaiq, radical Islamic jihadists have an awful lot of blood on their hands considering that they’re adherents of a faith that Muslim apologists insist is completely peaceful. What nobody ever wants to ask is how such a “peaceful” faith can result in so many murderous followers who claim to act under color of that faith.

Admittedly, the article from which I’m quoting is from May 2015, before the San Bernardino and Pulse Nightclub attacks the reality is that 99% of the time when there’s murderous violence in the world, it’s Islamic. Moreover, the Left’s standard of looking only at religiously or racially inspired hate crimes after 9/11 is a convenient way to ignore the fact that the Muslim murder tally sheet within less than 20 years includes 2,996 people killed in a single day. It will take a long time for other crazies in America (everyone from the psychopathic Dylan Roof to last week’s murderous Bernie supporter) to catch up with Islam’s worldwide killing spree.

Billoo was also an early voice for what we now know as intersectionality, which tends to mean designated Leftist victim groups following the Muslims’ lead and ganging up against Israel:

She said one can “be in solidarity with” a persecuted community without agreeing with it. She cited several ethnic and religious communities in America that have experienced and in some cases continue to experience discrimination. CAIR, the nation’s largest civil rights organization for Muslims, seeks to counter Islamophobia in part by making common cause with such groups. In Zahra’s view, CAIR helps all Americans by asserting the American values of equality for all while advocating for the rights of Muslim Americans.

While expressing sophisticated, even open-minded views about women and Islam (Billoo acknowledges a problem and says women should be allowed to dress as they please), Billoo is also one of many who is willing to lie about Koranic precepts regarding endless jihad against non-believers and, typically for a CAIR representative, she blames the US for Islam’s violence problem.

Asked if atrocities committed in the name of Islam made her feel ashamed to be Muslim, she indicated that they did not. She said that Islam commands Muslims to speak out against terrorism and that she has joined many other Muslims, including its preeminent scholars, in denouncing ISIS ideology. She feels more complicit as an American in the American government’s violence than she does as a Muslim in violence committed by Muslims, inasmuch as she funds the former with her taxes. She said she believes in the text of the Koran and that anything can be twisted. She does not believe any less in democracy because it has been used to spread violence. She said strife in the Muslim world is a reflection not just of Islam but of a hundred years of colonialism and corruption, a geopolitical problem as well as a religious one.

Billoo’s Twitter feed, which has almost 22,000 followers, has more of the same pro-Leftist, anti-American material. I’ll skip the CAIR stuff she retweets (all of which is anti-Republican and anti-white), and share with you a few of the other things she tweets or retweets:

And then there’s Linda Sarsour. What can I say about Linda Sarsour that hasn’t been said before?

She came to national prominence as one of the organizers of the Women’s March after President Trump’s inauguration. But as John Perazzo explains, she’s so much more than just an ordinary feminist:

A leading organizer of the Women’s March was the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. This group was founded shortly after 9/11—not to condemn the attacks, of course, but rather, to lament “the heightened sense of fear and the acts of blatant discrimination aimed at [the Muslim] community” in the racist wasteland known as America. On the premise that all government efforts to forestall additional terrorism constituted Nazi-like fascism, Sarsour and her organization played a central role in pressuring the New York Police Department to terminate its secret surveillance of the many Muslim groups and mosques suspected of promoting jihadism.

Sarsour is also a member of the Justice League NYC, which seeks to draw public attention to what it portrays as an epidemic of police brutality against African American civilians in New York City. The group’s constant drumbeat is the claim that the United States is awash in essentially the same ugly strain of racism as was prevalent in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.

An outspoken critic of Israel, Sarsour avvidly supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that uses various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and lawsuits to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

Vis-a-vis the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Sarsour favors a one-state solution where an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live together within the borders of a single country. She made clear her opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state when she tweeted in October 2012 that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

In 2004, Sarsour acknowledged that a friend of hers as well as a cousin were both serving long sentences in Israeli jails because of their efforts to recruit jihadists to murder Jews. Moreover, she revealed that her brother-in-law was serving a 12-year prison term because of his affiliation with Hamas.

What all three women — Shaiq, Billoo, and Sarsour — have in common is that they imply that they stand for Islamic moderation. Nothing that they do, though, advances the cause of modifying Islam’s murderous impulses. Instead, they consistently complain about ill-treatment meted out to them (despite an adoring media and cadre of cheering leftists), blame America for anything that Muslims do, and openly lie about Islam’s precepts. Moreover, when they’re not apologists for Islamic violence, they advance hard-Left ideas and use the Lefts’ notion of intersectionality to bring antisemitism and anti-Zionism to a larger cohort than the ordinary BDS crowd.

In other words, what these three woman are doing is advancing Islam, not through jihadist violence, but by preying on American pity and ignorance. As Hanan Ashwari’s successful apologetics on the PLO’s behalf reveal, this kind of soft jihad is even more dangerous than the violent kind. At least with violent jihad, you know you’re under attack. With soft, feminized jihad, however, you have no idea that your values are being undermined until they’re gone. And at that moment, as we see in Europe, violent jihad moves in with a vengeance, comfortable in the knowledge that its victims are too brainwashed to fight back.

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Bookworm came late to conservativism but embraced it with passion. She's been blogging since 2004 about anything that captures her fancy -- and that's usually politics. Her blog's motto is "Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts."